LAWYERS HELP NSSA INTERPRET AUDIT:
THE National Social Security Authority (NSSA) has commissioned a team of legal experts in various areas to look into potential acts of impropriety in four key areas identified by a forensic audit of NSSA’s operations that may have cost the State pensions entity millions of dollars.
Minister of Public Service Labour and Social Welfare Sekai Nzenza, told reporters at a press briefing in Harare yesterday that the team of lawyers was unpacking issues raised on four key areas namely corporate governance breaches, Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), investments and human resources.
The minister’s remarks comes amid growing anxiety over delayed release of the forensic report, which she said was the result of the need to follow due process in seeking experts’ guidance on how to deal with findings of the audit in each of the four key areas.
“The forensic report will help put our house in order. As I have said before, it’s going to be published once the team of lawyers have presented (their submissions), which will happen fairly soon,” she said.
Minister Nzenza said aspects of findings of report which are of a criminal nature will be referred to law enforcement agents for appropriate action to be taken.
She said the board would focus on addressing the authority’s corporate governance deficiencies, separation of powers between management and board, management of risk and alignment to the strategy and vision of President Mnangagwa.
The minister’s remarks yesterday also come after Environment, Tourism and Hospitality Minister Prisca Mupfumira, was last week arrested and charged with corruption involving US$95 million NSSA funds, which occurred during her reign as the labour minister.
She said Minister Mupfumira’s arrest and processes to address corporate Government issues within NSSA were completely separate issues.
NSSA, which collects pension contributions from every employed person, manages about $1,2 billion worth of assets and has investments running into hundreds of millions across all sectors of the economy including stocks, finance, property and hospitality.
Minister Nzensa said the forensic audit on NSSA, which was completed and handed over to her in March this year, was commissioned by her ministry and undertaken by the Auditor General (AG’s) office.
“I got the report in March through the Auditor General and we set down with the new board members and discussed it. Some of the four key issues to emerge were, issues to do with number one — corporate governance, number two — issues to do with IT, another one was to do with investments and the other issue is to do with HR.
“In all those four, there are some irregularities that required expert lawyers to unpack each one of them. So when you have a forensic report like that and it’s showing four absolutely key areas, that requires legal expertise; it’s not the kind of report that you simply present to the public,” she said.
Minister Nzenza said she even promised to share the report with Parliament, but this has taken longer than expected because of the need to bring on board expert legal minds to help unpack the documents. “I know I have an obligation to present it, and it shall be presented.”
NSSA chairman Dr Cuthbert Chidoori said at the same event that whenever findings of a forensic audit are presented, there is need to make sure that the right processes are followed, which deal exhaustively with issues raised.
“There are issues which maybe of a criminal nature or which border on some misdemeanours or wrong doing by whoever was there at the time; it is the prosecuting agents that will take care of that,” he said.
He said the team of lawyers from different locations was put together after a Government tender board to identify top legal experts with high competence in various specific disciplines.
Dr Chidoori said as a creature of statute, the new board was anxious to make sure NSSA played by the rules in terms of its mandate, including protecting the value of contributions from the public and pensioners, systematically and exhaustively while any wrong doing would be referred to the relevant agents to deal with.
“The forensic audit itself has recommendations and we will take each and every one of those recommendations seriously and make sure that we attach importance to anything which has to do with either our management, our processes as an institution of Government, as a parastatal,” Dr Chidoori said.
NSSA has frequently been dogged by allegations of corrupt activities, including the authority’s alleged role in funding a local commercial bank with millions of tax payers’ money without following due processes.